Once upon a time, I was a little bit – well, a lot, but it was Dos Geekery – geeky, but then I didn’t use it and lost all my geek talents. So we get this message Sunday from our service provider about our blog account being suspended. Why, March asked me? I have no idea! Patty responded. March put in a very cute and totally clueless trouble ticket. Blog hosting company tells us we have too much stuff on our front page and it puts a load on their servers and so we got suspended. Okay, annoying old blog hosting company sorta fell apart at the end, but they never bothered us with this level of detail.

So what does that mean, March’nPatty the Clueless Ones asked. And how-o-how do we fix it? Tech Support tells us to change our front page so we don’t load so much stuff. March and I look at each other (through e-mail) and blink eyes that have no idea what we should do next.

Other than just bare bones our front page so it has no graphics, no ads, no sidebars, just a simple Perfume Posse at the top, does anyone have some WordPress skilz or know someone who does and won’t charge us a fortune to tell us how to keep the GreenGeeks blog hosting guys from cutting us off again? I’ve been to lots of blogs that take a lot longer to load, so I keep thinking we’re not that excessive in our use, but what in the world do we know? Perfume, yeah. Blogginess? Not that much.

Shameless begging for cheap or free help.

I’m awash in perfume. The two angels that do all my decanting decided to take a vacation (!?!?!?!?) this week, so it’s just me and my youngest son, who, as it turns out, is much better at decanting than he was two years ago when I tried to get him to help before. I spent some time in there this morning early, trying to get some of this done – slowly, I might add, since I can’t find anything anymore – then had to head to the office for my day job meeting. I forgot what I had been doing until I got in my truck and smelled JAR Golconda on my wrist where I had splashed some and a little Jardenia around my ear, I think, and wasn’t that Chanel Egoiste on my elbow? Chloe too? Yeah, pretty sure. I happen to love walking into my house when decanting has been going on all day, and that crayon box of crazy perfume smells hits me as some whirled fragrant pea soup that’s pretty amazing. I think it may be a far different thing when I walk into a fairly staid office whirling my pea soup fragrance mosh pit around. Yes? I didn’t ask, I just tried to finish up quickly and get out.

For those of you as clueless as we are on the blog geekery, you need something to talk about, so what is the most embarrassing public perfume thing you’ve done? Spill Bal a Versailles on your shoe and forgot to change shoes before you went to the doctor’s office? You can tell us here.

This is interesting too!

Perfume Love for Everyone!

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72 Responses to “HelpHelp!”

Not a blog expert in any way but have some experience with web pages. Is it possible that the images you are uploading are big files? Not sure how it works when you put them on the blog, but if you are manually resizing them to make it look nice, that could be an issue. May need to compress the images before using.

I also wonder about the “recent comments” section. Am guessing it takes a bit of work for the server to grab and display those. Perhaps the same with the Facebook link since it must go grab that information as well.

Beyond that. . . .no ideas.

As for mistakes, my husband once stepped in a puddle of flavor oil while in a toothpaste plant. A small amount scents A LOT of toothpaste–quite potent. He didn’t have time to change before catching his flight home. One flight attendant told her co-worker she felt she was losing her mind because she swore kept smelling Crest toothpaste.

I’m not sure. They do resize to go in the post. I did a couple of things, like reducing the number of posts that load to 5, which seems to have sped things up. I have a feeling that Recent Comments thingie is a load, but March really likes it!

P, I like the Recent Comments thing because it helps me see new comments and (when I click on them) takes me to the reply form, which makes response easier. I’d never even noticed it was loading 20 posts! Reducing that to five would be a HUGE help, don’t you think? You go, girl! ^:)^

PS On the pics, they have to be relatively small files even to upload into wordpress, so I end up reducing them then.

I’m a web developer guy. It’s not image size, I’ve looked at your image sizes with a development tool and they’re tiny – WordPress and other Content Management Systems (CMSes) by nature put a heavy load on a server, and can take a lot of performance tweaking. GreenGeeks isn’t set up to provide that kind of support to a blog. There is an answer, but unfortunately it means moving your blog to a service that can handle the traffic, and it also means paying more than the “bargain” rate you’re currently paying to GreenGeeks.

The problem is that with a shared service like GreenGeeks, you’re one of a number of sites on the same server sharing its “horsepower”. That’s why GreenGeeks is $4.95 per month … this is fine for sites that aren’t resource heavy or have heavy traffic. Sometimes a site will outgrow its shared server, and be asked to move on or trim down which is what GreenGeeks is telling you; think of the small neighborhood plumber who’s called in to repair a major breakdown at a large airport. He/she simply isn’t set up to handle this sort of thing.

You could try another shared service but my guess is you’ll run into the same sort of problem. If you don’t want to strip your blog down to the bare bones, you’ll need to upgrade your hosting. This will cost you more than you’re currently paying. You’ll want someone who will give you a virtual private server (VPS), and provides an easy upgrade path if your needs grow in the future. An affordable option is SilverRack, which has a $20 per month option but you’ll probably need to pay someone to move the blog over and set it up since it’s not “one click” installation as you’ll get on a shared server. See: http://silverrack.com/

Thanks, Vasily. It’s a terrible problem to be too popular. I guess we could start writing really lame posts, but that isn’t going to do it either, sounds like. Also, I want to give you a big (but totally SFW) hug for saying all that in language which I think I understood. I find it incredibly painful, dealing with this stuff.

If you all would like me to provide some consulting to get you migrated to a host that can handle your present and future traffic, let me know via the Contact form on my site. I’d give you my Special Friend hourly rate. ;) There’s a host I have in mind that’s very good and provides virtual server management at a slightly higher rate than SilverRack, along with easy migration to more powerful plans if you outgrow their basic offering in the future.

I like Bluehost.com and it’s about $95 per year – don’t know what the traffic limits are but they must be higher than the $5/mo service. Just a plug for them as WordPress is available via SimpleScripts and super simple to maintain.

I have been a Bluehost customer for some years now … a number of professional website developers I know host their client sites there. It’s a good deal at about $7 per month. I personally have several sites under a single Bluehost account so it may very well work for Perfume Posse; it really depends on the level of traffic this site gets. It would be worth a call to them, certainly; if they can handle dozens of client sites under a single account I’d think they should be able to handle the traffic to this blog. Here’s my affiliate link if anyone cares to use it to sign up with them:

While I was piddling around, I found a place where you can change the default gravatar!

so now we both have all this useless knowledge that in no way reduces our front page load. i think I did fix some stuff, but I think that recent comment thingie may have to go. I’m just showing 5 posts on the front page now, which should be a huge help because pictures are a big load, and we were displaying 20. That’s probably enough to fix it, I think.

As a student I travelled very very early on Monday morning from home to university after a weekend off campus, staggered from train to bus and straight into lecture-hall with hold-all, and wondered why my perfume seemed so all-pervasive.
After the 9 am lecture I returned to my room and only then found that my bottle of Climat by Lancome had clearly not had its lid put on properly, and that the bottle in my hold-all was empty. Everything in the holdall was Climat-ised permanently.

I count my blessings because Climat is not a power-house knock ‘em dead scent, so no-one keeled over as I blithely passed them by, but I do wonder how long the scent lasted in the train?? A fairly expensive mistake for a student!

A friend of mine once packed a fifth of bourbon in his suitcase before heading off for a convention. The suitcase was hardsided, so I have no idea what the airline baggage handlers did to it, but when he got to his hotel and unpacked, the bottle had broken and he wafted bourbon all week.

I moonlighted (moonlit?) for a short while at the Filene’s men’s fragrance counter a number of years ago, and one day a customer at the Estee Lauder counter (directly across from the men’s counter) knocked a bottle of Youth Dew onto the floor where it promptly broke. It was awful!

I second the shrinking of images idea. When I post paintings to my artist share site, I have to shrink the jpegs to 30% in order not to offend the server. So I have 2 images of everything.
For perfume embarrassment, I remember my discovery of jasime sambac absolute. When I got my first bottle from Eden Botanicals, I was so blissed out, I added it to perfumer’s alcohol and spritzed myself silly (yeah, that whole poitrine down to my socks thing). Now jasmine sambac is my favorite flower, but she’s a nasty, dirty girl. I’ll never forget my students’ faces when I walked into the classroom!! Didn’t make that mistake again….

We aren’t entirely sure how to do that. We just upload them and go. I’m so embarrased to show our stupidity. I really did use to be pretty geeky, but if you don’t use it and new technology commes along and you don’t learn it, you are just left behind crying “but I know how to span disks!” or some other completely useless thing.

Patty, I’m with you on the “used to be pretty geeky”. I don’t mind that admission as much as admitting that I worked on a PC that cost $25,000 when almost NO office had one and the prices really were that exorbitant! :o

Oh, Lord…I remember those days! My first fax machine cost the earth ($2K? $4K? something insane like that) and weighed about as much, too! And I worked with a graphics company that had a CRAY which cost about $4.3 billion and ran graphics slower than any average laptop does these days. Technology moves fast, dunnit?

Of course, I was never geeky – well, I was (am?) but not techno-geeky.

Perfume embarrassment? Hell, I dunno. I’m pretty impervious to embarrassment but I recall feeling very uncomfortable about 2 years ago, when I attended a manufacturing seminar wearing a fluffy-ish white sweater and contemporary Femme. It was weird – the sweater was conservative but I’m a flat-knit fitted cardigan kinda gal – this made me feel all Joan Blondell and stuff – and the Femme made matters worse! I felt like I’d just rolled out of bed, wrapped in last night’s sheets! Totally threw me off my game.

I once put on a healthy dollop of Quelques Fleurs Royale before heading off to work, not realizing there is a hefty percentage of animalic jasmine in there. I spent about ten minutes trailing waves of Ho Panties before dashing to the restroom to wash (luckily it was only on wrists).

A friend send me a lovely bottle of cologne from Japan, and I tried a gentle dab of it. It was a delightful, light floral, rose-based, subtle. I couldn’t wait to wear it. Just before going for my bridal gown final fitting, I spritzed. The cologne metamorphed into the Godzilla of all roses, a huge sillage-monster that probably caused a perfectly nice seamstress to go home with another “You wouldn’t believe what I had to put up with today” story. The scent actually got louder over time, rather than fading too. It wasn’t an awful scent at all, just a very, very, very strong one.

I’m at a loss on your blog troubles, but I can cheer you on!! I hope you get it figured out! :d

My Embarrassing Perfume story: I was expecting a MUA package one day with a Borneo sample included (which I had never smelled before.) The mail came just before I needed to leave to take my daughter (who was still in diapers) to the pediatrician, so I spritzed my wrists quickly and left…..

While waiting for the doctor, Borneo started to morph on my wrists into this sewage-smelling nightmare. When the doctor finally came in our exam room she asked me to change my daughter’s diaper before she started the exam… and her diaper was clean and dry. Enter me trying to explain why I smelled like feces to a harried impatient pediatrician who wanted nothing more than to escape that exam room ASAP. I made my husband take her to the doctor the next several times she needed to go. :”>

On a whim last summer, I decided to trot out the Histoires d’Parfums Marquis de Sade on a hot July morning, just to see what would happen. Did my customary 3 spritzes, headed to a meeting, and was promptly encased in an impenetrable cloud of butt funk. It lasted for hours. People throughout the meeting kept looking over with the “I wish she’d go wipe the dog poop off of her shoe” look. Learned my lesson with that one, I did. #-o

When we went to Peru to do our fieldwork, the baggage handlers managed to break the wooden box in our bag that contained my husband’s bottle of perfume — I think it was some Gaultier thing at the time — and all of our shirts were completely drenched in it. We staggered around Lima and on the 13 hour bus trip to the North Coast reeking like a very metro whorehouse. People looked at us like we were insane, and there was not a thing we could do about it (laundry in Peru is by hand and air dried). He still can’t stand the smell of that scent today.

As for me, the most embarrassing thing — when I was a teen, I wore and loved a heavy, violet fragrance. All of my old friends recoil when thinking about it even now, 25 years after I traded it for other scents.

This isn’t too horrible, but I wore Angel to an eye doc appt. Forgot I had the appt or I never would have put it on! I actually apologized to the doc. He didn’t complain…maybe he liked it. Guys seem to like Angel in small doses, but I would never test that theory with my eye doc!!!

I’m also sorry I can’t help with your blog. I tried to pack 4 bottles of wine from Sonoma in my small roller bag. I knew I was in trouble when the suitcase came off the ramp with a plastic bag taped to it, it “jingled” when picked up and smelled like a vineyard! Sadly, it was the red that broke and the suitcase and most of the contents (less the other three bottle of white) had to be thrown away!

Hmm – I volunteered to run a Web site for a non-profit club, and even though the servers are dedicated and huge I still have a lot of trouble with stuff not working randomly, and sometimes even the tech staff has trouble figuring it out, so having lots of server space is not always the only issue. I feel your pain!

Embarrassing perfume story? Moi? I dunno, maybe wearing Jean Patou Sublime applied with a fire hose back in my younger days? I suspect that some people have still not forgiven me for that. And yes, I still love Sublime. :”>

Not too terribly embarrassing, but I did massively apply Musc Ravageur one day and got some pretty odd looks. I had to roll the windows down on the car on my way to work to avoid gassing myself with the fumes.

The best “stink” story I know is actually about a friend of mine in Paris who went to a Vietnamese restaurant and accidentally spilled a bottle of that fish oil on himself, then had to take a cab home. The cab driver complained all the way home about the smell, but his cat rather enjoyed it. :”>

Tracking down Bob Dylan bootlegs is my only computer claim to fame- so no help there, but I sure love checking your blog daily!

Embarrassing perfume story- I tested a small dab of F. Malle Carnal Flower and loved it. ‘Mo is betta’, right?- so I poured on the whole sample vial and went to do some grocery shopping OMG! I reeked! It’s impossible to shop with a 10′ personal space so I had no choice but to go home, wash off and try again :)

I’m the epitome of geek, but it’s medical/science. I would however be happy to donate a monthly stipend to the new server. My gaffe came when I tried to concoct Dior Jules as a gift for a very exacting Pilates coach. Just about had it too, but I got the box mixed up with some Lush Snow Fairy Pink snow cone fluid for my daughter. He opened it in class and proudly doused himself. I stopped concocting after that.

I used to wear Angel before I was introduced to the wonders of the online perfume world. Just a bit– spray in the air and walk through it. I always received compliments on how great I smelled. So, during the very early part of my relationship with a guy I was crazy about, I was getting ready to watch a movie at his house, and, uhh, sprayed (wince). . . a spray in each armpit. And oh, god. . . .it was horrible. What makes it worse is that he is not a perfume person at all, so I am sure he thought I wanted to poison him. . . or at least make him hate me so we wouldn’t date anymore.

We just sat there watching the movie, but not watching the movie. Hating life. Wishing I could disappear. Then I just sighed and said, “I’m so sorry. I know how bad I smell. I’m going to go wash off. Excuse me.” I was beet red from embarrassment.

Most embarassing perfume moment–back in the mid-80’s, I had some Caron Poivre, the parfum, which I couldn’t decide if I loved or hated. One morning, I decided it was love, and while I was dabbing it on, it splashed a little. I was late for work and went running to catch my train, so did not realize how much Poivre I had on until I was on the BART train. I felt self-conscious, so I apologized to the guy sitting next to me –“I’m sorry if my perfume is too strong, I did not mean to put on so much yadayada. . .” Wrong thing to do. The apology seemed to set him off- he started gagging and fussing, and kept repeating loudly ” It’s so STRONG! Eeew! It’s so STRONG!” I suspect if I had said nothing, he would not have even noticed the Poivre. When I tried the polite apology, the Poivre became the focus of every psychological projection he was carrying around in his psyche. Live and learn. :)>-